Christmas lights

Burnsland

2011-12-15

If you have seen any pictures of our Christmas lights around here (this should help: Christmas posts), then you know we like a lot of lights on our trees. What is the point of having a dark tree over in the corner, after all?

Unfortunately, fighting with Christmas lights isn’t always the most fun thing in the world. You get them out after being in storage for most of the year and plug them in. And they don’t work. Or only half of them work. Or they blink on and off, even if they aren’t supposed to be blinking lights. Or you run your finger over the end of the cord where you can plug in the next line of lights and feel a little tingle of electricity. Or whatever other problem you might have. You can try to fix them by replacing a blown out bulb, if you can find it. Or you can replace the little fuses, if you can manage to get those tiny things out. Or you just throw them away, which is probably preferred if you feel the electricity tingling. That never is a good thing.

Or maybe all the lights work, and then you try to put them on the tree. Only to find that they are tangled beyond belief. They have more tangles than a soap opera storyline. More tangles than Bob Marley’s hair. You get the idea. So you spend more time getting them untangled than it actually takes to put them on the tree.

Or maybe you avoid that entirely. Maybe you use a pre-lit tree. Which is all good. Until you plug it in and discover that not all of the lights are working. And you can’t remove them, because they are more or less made into the tree. So you either have to put lights on your pre-lit tree. Or just buy a complete new tree, having to decide if the whole pre-lit thing is worth it or not.

We have had better luck with the newer LED light strings. And even better, they use much less electricity. Which means that you can put even more of them on the tree. Where you could only put 3 strings of the old incandescent lights end-to-end, with these new LED lights you can put 87 strings together. Which may or may not be enough lights on a tree for light-lovers like us.

So getting lights on a Christmas tree is trouble. I think we can all agree on that. But in the end, it is absolutely worth it. Just to have that soft glow (or like us, a very bright glow) coming from your tree.

Until you have to take the whole thing down. But that is another problem for another time.